Three years after winning the 1989 Booker prize for The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro said, in an interview with Pico Iyer, that he felt he could “produce something pretty strange and weird now”. In 1995, he delivered on that promise with The Unconsoled, an enigmatic, mazy and Kafkaesque journey through a nameless European country, as unlike The Remains as anyone could have wished for. Since then, he has taken us (less strangely) to 1930s China (When We Were Orphans) and (more strangely) the imaginary British dystopia of Never Let Me Go, where children are raised as organ donors; but this novel might be his strangest yet.
We are in post-Arthurian, pre-Norman Britain; Saxons and Britons coexist in an uneasy but functioning truce, yet the land is wreathed in icy mists – the exhalation of a she-dragon, we learn, whose effect is to rob people of their memories. We follow an ageing couple, Axl and Beatrice, who live in a British settlement composed of tunnels dug into a hillside. They decide to journey to a village, a few days’ walk away, to visit their son; they can hardly remember him, but assume he will be waiting “impatiently” to see them.
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